"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.

"Philosophical self-reflection assures itself of the non-conceptual in the concept. Otherwise this latter would be, after Kant?s dictum, null, ultimately no longer the concept of something and thereby void. The philosophy which recognizes this, which cancels out the autarky of the concept, strikes the blinders from the eyes.."

"No theory escapes the market anymore: each one is offered as a possibility among competing opinions, all are made available, all snapped up. Thought need no more put blinders on itself, in the self-justifying conviction that one?s own theory is exempt from this fate, which degenerates into narcissistic self-promotion, than dialectics need fall silent before such a reproach and the one linked to it, concerning its superfluity and randomness as a slapdash method. Its name says to begin with nothing more than that objects do not vanish into their concept, that these end up in contradiction with the received norm of the adaequatio."

-"Philosophy has, at this historical moment, its true interest in what Hegel, in accordance with tradition, proclaimed his disinterest: in the non-conceptual, the individual and the particular; in what, ever since Plato, has been dismissed as transient and inconsequential and which Hegel stamped with the label of lazy existence.

"In sharp contrast to the usual scientific ideal, the objectivity of dialectical cognition needs more subject, not less. Otherwise philosophical experience shrivels. But the positivistic spirit of the epoch is allergic to this."

"Rationality itself is to an increasing extent equated more mathematico [Latin: in mathematical terms] with the capability of quantification. As much as this took into account the primacy of the triumphant natural sciences, so little does it lie in the concept of the ratio in itself. It is blinded not the least because it blocks itself off from qualitative moments as something which is for its part to be rationally thought."

"One can no longer paddle along in the mainstream, even the word sounds dreadful of modern philosophy. The recent kind, dominant until today, would like to expel the traditional moments of thought, dehistoricizing it according to its own content, assigning history to a particular branch of an established fact-collecting science. Ever since the fundament of all cognition was sought in the presumed immediacy of the subjectively given, there have been attempts, in thrall to the idol of the pure presence, as it were, to drive out the historical dimension of thought. The fictitious one-dimensional Now becomes the cognitive ground of inner meaning."

'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

So here's the thing, we have a situation where private companies are applying censorship standards that are often quite arbitrary and generally more narrow than the free speech constitutional standards that we have in democracies. Or they're responding to censorship requests by authoritarian regimes that do not reflect consent of the governed. Or they're responding to requests and concerns by governments that have no jurisdiction over many, or most, of the users and viewers who are interacting with the content in question.

And

So here's the situation. In a pre-Internet world, sovereignty over our physical freedoms, or lack thereof, was controlled almost entirely by nation states. But now we have this new layer of private sovereignty in cyberspace. And their decisions about software coding, engineering, design, terms of service all act as a kind of law that shapes what we can and cannot do with our digital lives. And their sovereignties, cross-cutting, globally interlinked, can in some ways challenge the sovereignties of nation states in very exciting ways, but sometimes also act to project and extend it at a time when control over what people can and cannot do with information has more effect than ever on the exercise of power in our physical world.

She adds that the reality is that even in democratic societies today, we do not have good answers for how you balance the need for security and law enforcement on one hand and protection of civil liberties and free speech on the other in our digital networks. In fact, in the United States, whatever you may think of

She adds:

The most urgent question we need to be asking today is how do we make sure that the Internet evolves in a citizen-centric manner. Because I think all of you will agree that the only legitimate purpose of government is to serve citizens. And I would argue that the only legitimate purpose of technology is to improve our lives, not to manipulate or enslave us...So what we need to recognize is that if we want to have a citizen-centric Internet in the future, we need a broader and more sustained Internet freedom movement. After all, companies didn't stop polluting

While private sector companies have a responsibility to respect and uphold the rights of customers and users, they cannot on their own be expected to solve the political and geopolitical problems that threaten free expression in the first place. Addressing the core problems requires government leadership.